The Great Climate Migration

The world is undergoing tremendous climate changes, effecting global migration patterns. Partnering with ProPublica and the Pulitzer Center, the New York Times Magazine estimates future climate migration across borders using migration modeling based on econometrics.

The human consequences of climate changes are “between flight or death,” and is likely to lead to “the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.” A simple cost and benefit analysis would lead to migration. “According to a path-breaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined.” As the planet warms, the climate band where people live shifts north. Extreme hot zones are covering more and more land and forcing people out of the climate niche where they thrived for thousands of years. As a result, more than 8 million people from Southeast Asia moved toward the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Refugees continue to flee from Central America to the United States and from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe. These extreme weather patterns will “amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.”

The climate migration study found that 5 percent of total migrants are driven primarily by climate change. A model that focused on Central America shows that although migration increases yearly regardless of climate, it also rises substantially with climate change. One model scenario with relatively open borders projected annual migrants to rise from about 700,000 a year in 2025 to 1.5 million arriving from Central America and Mexico by 2050. Another scenario where people turned back shows slower economic growth and urbanization, rising birthrate, growing poverty, and hunger – “[leaving] tens of millions of people desperate and with fewer options… Misery reigns and large populations become trapped.”

Post by Isabel Wang, Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: Lustgarten, Abrahm. “The Great Climate Migration,” The New York Times, 23 July, 2020.